3 ms·

Part I: Let's get real here: Yes, in the OP, the good news is likely: > People who do consulting or freelancing for a living might realize this is isomorphic

by graycat 11y ago

Part I: Let's get real here: Yes, in the OP, the good news is likely: > People who do consulting or freelancing for a living might realize this is isomorphic to getting consulting engagements. It really is. It’s fundamentally running a sales process for yourself, which is a really weird skill On salary negotiation, I'd suggest bringing in some super important data: Within easy commuting distance of the job, go house hunting. Want 3-4 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, with family room and two car garage. Maybe also full, dry basement, nice yard, nice landscaping, pool, nice neighborhood, good schools. So, get the figure per month for the house -- principle, interest, taxes, insurance, maintenance. Add in your medical insurance, life insurance, IRA, and college fund for the kids. Add in cost of cars for yourself and wife and, later, kids. Add in usual costs of living -- food, clothing, education for the kids, home furnishings, smart phones, Internet access, desktop computers, professional memberships, professional publications, etc. Add in some for recreation. Add in some for contingencies, say, for the kids, private schools, tutoring, violin, swimming lessons, etc. Then look at taxes -- city, state, and Federal. Then add it all up. Then add, say, 30%. That's your figure. Justify it with > I have a family, and I am the breadwinner. I have a wife and two kids, and we want two more kids. My wife is busy with the kids, and with the home, she is fully busy. We need the usual, food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, recreation, education for the kids, retirement for my wife and I, insurance against risk, plus smaller items. In addition, my wife's mother needs to come stay with us. In this area, that's what it comes to. To have less than that would make us financially irresponsible. Of course, if the employer wants to hire a single person who wants to live in an efficiency apartment and use busses and taxis for transportation, then, okay, but need to know that. > It is well worth your time to take another developer out for a hamburger and say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about the company." Maybe. But this other person might tend to see you as a competitor and want to hurt your career instead of a colleague who wants to help your career. > The nature of careers for us is just working for 40 years for IBM and then receiving a gold watch is something that very few of us are going to be able to successfully do, and that frankly, I’m not even sure I want. Actually, I much more than not sure I want. I’m sure I do not want, do not want. Right, don't want it. But, it's been a very long time since IBM offered such a career. The more common situation was, in an IBM area, a house cost 5+ times what the IBM annual salary was so that, really, the employee had to pay for their house out of other funds and was basically subsidizing IBM. So, who was living in those houses? In some cases, IBM employees who joined when the house prices were much lower. But in most cases, people just not working at IBM or in any such job. Instead, likely they were doing well in small business, e.g., as owners. More generally, there is a biggie fundamental problem with the whole career and salary negotiation process in the article: The company will just NOT for long be able to pay more than the work of the job is worth. So, really, the employee needs to know what the heck the work is worth and try to get as much of that as possible, and for that, and quite fundamentally, the employee needs in some significant sense, in one word, 'ownership' of the business. So, we've got to be talking stock or the person just owning their own business. Biggie point: If own the business and run it, then are facing the 'market' for the product/service the business provides. If that market is poor, gotta pick another business. If that market is good, then the worker gets to keep what the work is really worth. That point is a huge biggie. As an employee, will have a tough time getting for very long even half what the work is really worth in the market. This is a crude analysis, but it can be the difference between (A) being single and (B) providing for a good family and a good life. From the OP, here is another really fundamental point: > “Look, I understand just if I start to read through the resume, it doesn’t look like the most promising candidate, but when given a very complicated engineering task, which involved both security research, and then a complicated open-ended data analysis task, they not only successfully solved the task, but produced a deliverable which could literally be published in a research journal, Okay, if that is impressive, and it should be, then there's another approach: Look on the resume for candidates who actually have PUBLISHED such work in a peer-reviewed journal of original research. Or, at least they have a Ph.D. degree from a good research university where their dissertation was just such work and is likely publishable. Let's have an example: Recently at the company, there have been some unexpected problems -- outages, performance degradations, security breaches, etc. -- in the network and some in the server farm. So, the company wanted, in general terms, better near real-time monitoring for such unexpected problems. That is, the company wanted continual reports on health and wellness of their network and server farm. They have been using various approaches, but especially thresholds, and in total the approaches have two biggie problems -- false alarm rate too high and detection rate too low. Joe looked at that situation and saw that from Microsoft, Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, Oracle, Cisco, HP, etc., there is a river of data available for monitoring. So, he could get data on any of some literally hundreds of relevant variables at data rates of a value each few seconds up to thousands of values a second. So, Joe thought about how to use that data to get better monitoring. Well rested in a quiet room he put his feet up, popped open a cold can of diet soda, reviewed the problem and old approaches, reviewed some of this educational background, and had some ideas. Eventually, he noticed: If look at, say, two variables jointly, should be able to do better on false alarm rate and detection rate than looking at the variables separately, unless the variables are independent, which in common cases the definitely are not. So, in some sense, want to exploit several variables not individually but jointly. Next, Joe noticed that with false alarm rate and detection rate, he was reminded of his course in Statistics 101 and, there, hypothesis testing with Type I error, Type II error, and the 'power' of a test, that is, some tests are more 'powerful' than others. Also he checked in an intermediate text on statistics and noticed that the classic Neyman-Pearson result says how to get the most powerful test possible. Then Joe had some ideas, got some real data, wrote some prototype code, and the results looked good. Joe was able to adjust false alarm rate, and know the rate in advance, for any detection say what was the lowest false alarm rate at which the data would still be a detection, and had really good reason to believe in an especially high detection rate. He published his work in a high end peer-reviewed journal of original research and gave a seminar on that work at a world famous, high end server farm where reliability is taken very seriously. He put this work on his resume, sent 1000 copies, and never heard back. So, back to the last quote above from the OP, here comes the biggie surprise: Doing such work won't get you hired. Hardly a chance. Now, we should all be screaming, why, why, why, why, why?

graycat 11y ago
Part II: Okay, maybe that monitoring work would not be very important. But, maybe the company is facing some challenges in routing, scheduling, planning that, as is commonly the case, boils down to linear integer optimization, right, known to be in NP-complete. So, an impressive example might be a 0-1 integer linear program with, say, 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables. Then, asking for a solution that is optimal, down to the last tiny fraction, might be a bit much, but coming within 1% of optimality might be nice. So, suppose Joe came withing 0.025% of optimality? Might want to chat with Joe about any problems in looking for good combinations. So, Joe also put that work on the 1000 resume copies he sent. Ah, usually the real data is arriving in ways that are not fully predictable. So, there is a stochastic process and want to know some of what the results will be. Once Joe was in touch with some people in touch with the US Navy, and they wanted an evaluation of how long the US fleet of SSBN missile firing submarines would be under as special scenario of global nuclear war but limited to sea. From an old B. Koopman report and some common sense assumptions, Joe saw a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process subordinated to a Poisson process, wrote and ran Monte Carlo software to do the evaluations, and had the work please the US Navy and be sold to a leading US intelligence agency (could say which one but then would have to ...). Joe put that on his resume, too. Then Joe got a call back, and they wanted to know what he knew about C, Python, and R. Joe said that he'd one some C programming, but the language was so primitive that it was usually next to useless for his work in analysis. For R, that was just simple, standard statistics, and the work he'd done is statistics was beyond what R offered and he wrote his own code. For Python, that was similar -- instead he'd written his own code. The interview died. Okay, there's a fundamental lesson here: Fundamentally, in US business, the attitude remains much as back in a Henry Ford plant 100 years ago: The company and the company managers know more than any candidate employee, about the work, how to do the analysis, how to write the software, and an employee is there just to add routine labor to what the company already knows. So, a resume that mentions work beyond what the company knows conflicts with this fundamental attitude and results in rejection. In US mainline business (there are exceptions elsewhere), they are just very strongly against hiring as an employee someone able to do something the company can't already do. So, dumb down the resume. Then inside the company, fit in, don't expose real potential. Then look for a good, new problem, say, needing analysis such as in the OP. Then, largely independently, after hours, make some progress through prototype code and some impressive real output from real data. Then develop some high level foils, go to the relevant manager, and give a short talk. Then expect 'incoming' attacks, vicious, whisper campaigns, sabotage, etc., from jealous people. Then discover if the company really wants good analysis or not. If so, likely will have to transfer to a much better position, say, on staff of the CEO. Else, will likely soon get FIRED. No joke. If say anything about such analysis before actually have the results, then people will either laugh or attack. The situation is quite general, say, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Gandhi So, what the heck to do? Sure, face the market directly. Do a startup. Pick your own problem, do you own analysis, write your own code. Back to it. Work for today: Use a .NET collection class for a fast, easy to program way to find duplicates. So, a Web server, a Web session state store (wrote my own with just TCP/IP sockets, class instance de/serialization, and two instances of a collection class instead of using, say, SQL Server or Redis), SQL Server, and two specialized back-end servers, 18,000 programming language statements in Visual Basic .NET in 80,000 lines of typing. Going live is getting to be very visible! Let's see: The work is intended to provide the world's first good, a must have, solution for a problem pressing for nearly everyone connected to the Internet. To start, if I can get on average one user a second, 24 x 7, then, ballpark, I should get monthly revenue of 2 * 8 * 5 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 207,360 dollars. Now, in the OP, what annual salary ranges where they talking about? The core analysis work? Silicon Valley has more hen's teeth than entrepreneurs who would understand that work even if I explained it to them, and many more such entrepreneurs than such VCs! If you have something and explain it, then, if it is really bad, no one will like it. But, curiously, if it is really good, the same, no one will like it. Remember what Gandhi said. Or, easier and much the same lesson, just go back to kindergarten and to Mother Goose and "The Little Red Hen" -- same stuff. The hen wouldn't get hired, either.

by graycat 11y ago

graycat 11y ago

Part II: Okay, maybe that monitoring work would not be very important. But, maybe the company is facing some challenges in routing, scheduling, planning that, as is commonly the case, boils down to linear integer optimization, right, known to be in NP-complete. So, an impressive example might be a 0-1 integer linear program with, say, 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables. Then, asking for a solution that is optimal, down to the last tiny fraction, might be a bit much, but coming within 1% of optimality might be nice. So, suppose Joe came withing 0.025% of optimality? Might want to chat with Joe about any problems in looking for good combinations. So, Joe also put that work on the 1000 resume copies he sent. Ah, usually the real data is arriving in ways that are not fully predictable. So, there is a stochastic process and want to know some of what the results will be. Once Joe was in touch with some people in touch with the US Navy, and they wanted an evaluation of how long the US fleet of SSBN missile firing submarines would be under as special scenario of global nuclear war but limited to sea. From an old B. Koopman report and some common sense assumptions, Joe saw a continuous time, discrete state space Markov process subordinated to a Poisson process, wrote and ran Monte Carlo software to do the evaluations, and had the work please the US Navy and be sold to a leading US intelligence agency (could say which one but then would have to ...). Joe put that on his resume, too. Then Joe got a call back, and they wanted to know what he knew about C, Python, and R. Joe said that he'd one some C programming, but the language was so primitive that it was usually next to useless for his work in analysis. For R, that was just simple, standard statistics, and the work he'd done is statistics was beyond what R offered and he wrote his own code. For Python, that was similar -- instead he'd written his own code. The interview died. Okay, there's a fundamental lesson here: Fundamentally, in US business, the attitude remains much as back in a Henry Ford plant 100 years ago: The company and the company managers know more than any candidate employee, about the work, how to do the analysis, how to write the software, and an employee is there just to add routine labor to what the company already knows. So, a resume that mentions work beyond what the company knows conflicts with this fundamental attitude and results in rejection. In US mainline business (there are exceptions elsewhere), they are just very strongly against hiring as an employee someone able to do something the company can't already do. So, dumb down the resume. Then inside the company, fit in, don't expose real potential. Then look for a good, new problem, say, needing analysis such as in the OP. Then, largely independently, after hours, make some progress through prototype code and some impressive real output from real data. Then develop some high level foils, go to the relevant manager, and give a short talk. Then expect 'incoming' attacks, vicious, whisper campaigns, sabotage, etc., from jealous people. Then discover if the company really wants good analysis or not. If so, likely will have to transfer to a much better position, say, on staff of the CEO. Else, will likely soon get FIRED. No joke. If say anything about such analysis before actually have the results, then people will either laugh or attack. The situation is quite general, say, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Gandhi So, what the heck to do? Sure, face the market directly. Do a startup. Pick your own problem, do you own analysis, write your own code. Back to it. Work for today: Use a .NET collection class for a fast, easy to program way to find duplicates. So, a Web server, a Web session state store (wrote my own with just TCP/IP sockets, class instance de/serialization, and two instances of a collection class instead of using, say, SQL Server or Redis), SQL Server, and two specialized back-end servers, 18,000 programming language statements in Visual Basic .NET in 80,000 lines of typing. Going live is getting to be very visible! Let's see: The work is intended to provide the world's first good, a must have, solution for a problem pressing for nearly everyone connected to the Internet. To start, if I can get on average one user a second, 24 x 7, then, ballpark, I should get monthly revenue of 2 * 8 * 5 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 207,360 dollars. Now, in the OP, what annual salary ranges where they talking about? The core analysis work? Silicon Valley has more hen's teeth than entrepreneurs who would understand that work even if I explained it to them, and many more such entrepreneurs than such VCs! If you have something and explain it, then, if it is really bad, no one will like it. But, curiously, if it is really good, the same, no one will like it. Remember what Gandhi said. Or, easier and much the same lesson, just go back to kindergarten and to Mother Goose and "The Little Red Hen" -- same stuff. The hen wouldn't get hired, either.